Where Does My Money Go?

Introduction

The aim of the ‘Where Does My **Money **Go’ project is to visualise government spending through the ‘lifecycle’: that is from when money enters the system as tax to when it leaves as services, support, etc.

This document explains the data we have chosen to detail this ‘lifecycle’.

Our goals:

• Complete coverage of central government spending in the UK
• Estimate personal tax contribution based on income and any other relevant factors
• Coverage of local government spending in the UK

Data Summary Table

Data Dependency Diagram

Insert diagram for data flow from each dataset.

E.g. PESA and CRA derive from COINS

Custom & Excise (HMRC) -> HMT -> ONS

HMT-> COINS -> PESA
            \|/  |
           CRA  |  there are formula in PESA to convert CG data in Blue Book to those in PESA
                 \|/
 ONS -> Blue Book

Central Government Expenditure:

• COINS COINS stores public expenditure and budgeting data in a database called Camalot that is designed to handle and track budgets following the transition to Resource Allocation Budgeting in the early 2001-02. The feature of COINS that is of most interest to this project, is that it stores how the budgeted money has been spent and where the benefit has been had in the country. But it stores this information in more detail than is currently published — there are 14,000 spending codes, called Programme Objects (PO), in COINS to document where money has been spent, there are just under 2,000 Programme Object Group (POG) codes published in the CRA. The WDMMG project has collected a number of important materials to help public understanding of the COINS database, including: The schema for COINS, the contract for COINS, the training materials for using COINS, a complete list of PO and associated POGs [1].

• Country Regional Analysis (CRA) The CRA is a data set produced annually by the HM Treasury. The data is produced by each government department and collected by the Treasury in February. Each government department has to determine which parts of the country have benefited from spending in its different programs (Program Object Groups — POGs). The programs are associated with COFOG functions and a mixture of the government’s own naming scheme. We have a script to associate each POG with a COFOG function.

• Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis (PESA) It is public spending by combinations of :
  • government function (defined by the UN Classification Of the Functions Of Government (COFOG) for 2007 onwards) government department
  • area of the country (defined by the 1NUTS12 classification system)
  • time (estimates of future spending and reviews of past spending)
  • forms of aggregation (this includes dividing spending between DEL and AME, resource (near-cash and non-cash) and capital, and administration and programme budgets).
• **ONS Blue Book **is a summary of a vast range of data collected from central government, local government business and other data sets collected by the office of national statistics about the British population. Unlike the other data sets the Blue Book uses the European System of Accounts which classifies the recipients of the spending differently to, for example, PESA which uses the UN Classification Of the Functions Of Government (COFOG).

Local Government

PESA shows local authority spending in the tables of Chapter 7 (Excel file). This shows the sum of central government support to local authorities. It also shows what the expenditure is used for — such as education or social services.

The most detailed source of local authority spending found is the Communities and Local Government report ‘Local Government Financial Statistics England‘.

The communities and local government spending report was presented as a form where you can select a local authority, in a spreadsheet which then shows the spending for that authority broken down by service provided.

There are 7 sheets in this document and each one behaves has described in the previous sentence, but shows more detail on a particular area of spending, e.g. health, education etc and for each sheet the list of authorities you can find out about is different.

There is another sheet within the Local Government Financial Statistics is called ‘Mapping’, which shows the authorities listed and their relationships are shown. These listings and relationships were managed by the environment agency but are now managed by CIPFA. The CIPFA codes do not cover all public bodies. A more complete list of codes for public bodies is maintained by WDMMG team member who also runs Openly Local.

There is a ‘flat’ copy of the first page of this spreadsheet at http://ckan.net/package/uk-local-spending-report. This spreadsheet also associates each authority with the unique code identifier.

There is a presentation of the money local authorities receive on page 2 of the Communities and Local Government report ‘Local Government Financial Statistics England (PDF)’.

There are searchable details about each region’s local authorities at the websites Openly Local and the audit commission has One Place.